perfsonar development work

[Domenico Vicinanza <>]

Hi Luchesar and hi everybody,

the format "perfSONAR-<SERVICE_ID>" as first word of the log entry is an 
important requirement for us because that is the variable syslog-ng 
associates to the responsible of the log. So it could not be a date or 
simply the location.
The other fields can be organized as you were suggesting. Our perfSONAR 
logentries should start with

perfSONAR-AS ...
perfSONAR-LS ...
...

Just as a remark, we preferred for the time being to not use the log4j 
but adding the prefix "perfSONAR-<SERVICE_NAME>" in the syslog-ng 
configuration, for example, perfSONAR AS logfile:

source aslog{
       pipe("/dev/aslog" log_prefix("perfSONAR-AS: ") );
};

In this way if perfSONAR services need to be updated or reinstalled we 
do not have to set the format preferences again.
Many thanks anyway to you and Roman.

Cheers,
Domenico


Luchesar V. ILIEV wrote:
> OK, here's a modified proposal:
>
> % LOCATION % SERVICE_ID % SEVERITY % bla-bla-bla
>
> e.g.:
>
> % DANTE % SSH_TELNET-MP % DEBUG % bla-bla-bla
>
> or in full:
>
> May 29 17:29:58 srv3 % DANTE % SSH_TELNET-MP % DEBUG % ExistDbFactory: 
> Creating XML RPC Storage Manager
>
> From my (humble) experience it should be quite easy parsable with perl 
> or awk for instance (using " % ", that is % with the spaces around, as 
> delimiter.) Still, it looks in my eyes easy to digest, and placing 
> location before service actually seems more logical in hierarchical 
> sense.
>
> Comments?
>
> Cheers,
> Luchesar
>
> P.S. Is "perfSONAR-" before SERVICE_ID required?
>
> P.P.S. Slightly better looking, but requiring two-pass parsing could be:
>
> %% LOCATION :: SERVICE_ID :: SEVERITY %% bla-bla-bla
>
> e.g.:
>
> %% DANTE :: SSH_TELNET-MP :: DEBUG %% bla-bla-bla
>
> or in full:
>
> May 29 17:29:58 srv3 %% DANTE :: SSH_TELNET-MP :: DEBUG %% 
> ExistDbFactory: Creating XML RPC Storage Manager
>
>
>
> Luchesar V. ILIEV wrote:
> > Domenico Vicinanza wrote:
> > > Hi Nicolas,
> > >
> > > exactly,  in particular, if it is possible:
> > >
> > > [perfSONAR-SERVICE_ID] 
> > > [@LOCATION]
> > >  SEVERITY% DESCRIPTION
> > >
> > > It is important for us to have the serviceID in the first word of 
> > > the log: it is the way syslog-ng is able to detect the program which 
> > > caused the log and allows the proper classification in our database. 
> > > For example:
> > >
> > > perfSONAR-RRDMA srv3.ams.nl.geant2.net WARNING  <description>
> > >
> > > It is better, to ease the parsing process, not to have dots (.) as 
> > > separator between location and severity, since the host names 
> > > contain dots too.
> >
> > That's very good point, indeed. Concerning location, however, do you 
> > really prefer it to be hostname? E.g. for BREN/ISTF, the domain name 
> > will be... something.acad.bg. Not very intuitive, I'm afraid.
> >
> > Anyway, if we'd like to do fast parsing, we could use something like 
> > this:
> >
> > %pS-RRD_MA%srv3.ams.nl.geant2.net%WARNING% bla-bla-bla
> >
> > I, personally, wouldn't be happy using spaces as delimiters, as they 
> > are basically ubiquitous, and so make a very difficult to handle 
> > delimiter.
> >
> > The percent sign was inspired by, as you might've guessed, Cisco. 
> > It's quite rare, but even then perhaps we should impose a restriction 
> > on using it in the messages/descriptions themselves. Yet, as a 
> > beginning, I think it should be OK even without.
> >
> > Sure, the percent sign makes the messages less legible, but it's a 
> > balance we must find: legibility vs ease of parsing (just like with 
> > the dots, BTW.)
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Luchesar


--
______________________________________________________________________

Domenico Vicinanza
Services Support Engineer

DANTE - www.dante.net

Tel: +44 (0)1223 371 300
Fax: +44 (0)1223 371 371
Email: 



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